Swedish Prosecutor Claims Registrar Of .se Domains An 'Accomplice' In Infringement Because Of Pirate Bay Domain

from the how-many-degrees-of-separation? dept

The concepts of secondary liability seem to go right out the window (along with basic rationality) when it comes to certain people freaking out about copyright infringement. The latest is that Swedish prosecutors are apparently threatening the registrar that manages the .se domain with some form of charges because the Pirate Bay (briefly) ran on an .se domain.

“The legal system has not been able to shut down the service after the previous guilty verdict against TPB,” IIS Chief of Communications Maria Ekelund told TorrentFreak.

“Therefore the prosecutor has opened a new case against both the domain holders and .SE. The prosecutor is accusing .SE of assisting TPB who are assisting others to commit copyright infringement.”

[....] “In the eyes of the prosecutor, .SE’s catalogue function has become some form of accomplice to criminal activity, a perspective that is unique in Europe as far as I know,” says IIS CEO Danny Aerts.

That seems fairly ridiculous when you begin to think about the implications of it. This is so far removed from any actual infringement, it's incredible. This is the scorched earth approach to dealing with copyright infringement, with no care at all for any possible collateral damage in holding totally unrelated parties, who happened to be used by a service provider who, in turn, happened to be used by some people to possibly infringe, as liable for that infringement.

So...

If he has/had a website that had infringing stuff on it, he wouldn't care if it got taken down for no reason then, right?

but I think a more apt thing is this...

If someone at his home had something that was given to them, even if it was legally bought, from someone else, his house was raided, everything confiscated by some military then his house burned down while he can only watch in horror...

Up next

Hmm... I think Iran, North Korea, and other anti-America countries have a new way to hurt the US.

The US owned .com domain has aided and abetted MUCH worse and much more numerable crimes! Including

-Hosting child porn
-Hosting illegal files for download like music and videos
-Hosting porn in general
-Hosting websites that tell people how to do dangerous things, such as build an atomic bomb, cover your tracks after you commit a serious crime like murder

Imagine all the economic damage if .com starts arbitrarily dumping large numbers of websites to avoid legal liability from all that stuff!

It is actions like this that have convinced me that copyright needs to be abolished. It is being used as a lever to destroy the Internet, and the politicians are not worried about this because it would remove a means that allows citizens to organize themselves.

More of the same.

This is a brazen attempt to censor someone that is using speech that is the supposed "property" of someone else and they're trying to do it by throwing the baby out with the bath water or culling the herd to get one sick cattle. I find it reprehensible and despicable that people accept the idea the some speech can be owned and grant people the power to censor others from using that speech because of monetary concerns. Copyright is not about the profitability, or the enabling of, a particular business model. Copyright was concerned with one thing: greater access to a greater supply of creative and educational works so that others can use those to create even more works. However, we don't enjoy such a benefit, we are beholden to abide by overreaching property rights that have been insidiously obtained for the exclusive benefit of rent seekers like the publishing corporations in total contradiction to free speech. Speech is the inalienable right of every intelligent being capable of symbolic interaction. No one, and I mean NO ONE, deserves to subvert or abridge that right for any reason.

The whole reason publishers need the copyright laws to exist as they do is because the publishers themselves do not offer anything of value that is exclusive or scarce. They exploit the people that do the real work so they can collect income because they merely "own" something. The people they pay to create works already provided the exclusive and scarce value in content: the labor applied to the content's creation. They use their vast supply of money to exploit hard-working people so they can turn that money into more money, all without adding anything of real value. To do this, they establish laws that create the illusion of scarcity so that they can sell something that does not merit a market price. If ideas were worth money, the deluge of ideas coming at the publishing corporations would be bought up at a feverish pace, but ideas are worth shit. What's worth money is how you can execute that idea into an expression. If you execute well, people will respond. If not, you'll be ignored.

So, this whole idea of censoring free speech to silence a few people violating their ill-gotten property rights is just ethically disgusting. Nobody deserves nor needs copyright since it has no redeeming qualities. Any argument made for the existence of copyright can be countered by adapting business strategies to fit the situation. If you don't want people to get your works for free, then don't publish them. I guarantee you that is the only way you'll avoid anybody copying your works. Publishing is the first step to sharing content. However, the only person that will ever know about your work is you.

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A domain name is just that: a name.

Are you arguing is that I can't name my kid, say, Jack because that name was used by a notorious criminal (Jack the Ripper)?

From the point of view of the registrar, if someone wants to register a name like "piratebay.se" whatever happens beyond the technicalities of domain name registration is not their problem. Someone else will have to sort that out.

Re: Re: You may be next, Pirate Mike!

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The main problem is secondary liability because it will be taken to insane extremes. This is not practiced on the Internet for good reason. A second problem involves DHS services and their ability to properly route traffic. Blocking routers fundamentally threatens the nature of the net. Third, futility. Nothing the MPAA can ever do will make a dent in Internet piracy, but their quixotic quest will do a lot of damage to innocent third parties if we don't fight them at every turn.

Re: Liability Slipery Slope

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I think it is utlility companies in general. If infringers didn't have water and gas to they would not be able to drink or cook their food. Wait.... Wait... Grocery stores. If the infringers had no food. Wait.... Wait.... Damn farmers!!!!

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"Nothing the MPAA can ever do will make a dent in Internet piracy"

That's not true.There are plenty of things they are doing successfully right now - streaming albums in advance, for instance. Which is why we have more reason than ever to be suspicious of radical new legal responses.

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This is hardly secondary liability any more. I would reckon that we are not even talking tertiary liability! The Pirate Bay was ruled to "encourage infringement". That is in itself a secondary or tertiary liability to actual infringement and/or facilitating infringement. In this case, the registrar of the name is sued for the notoriety of the names past. That is so far removed from the crime at hand that you can essentially sue utility plants or W3C for having created the www protocol!

I am completely in line with .se on this one. As they state:
".SE will naturally respond to the prosecutorís perspective. We have an educational task ahead of us in explaining to the District Court what a domain name is, what .SE does and the fundamentally incorrect nature behind seizing a domain name forever."

I am confused as to how anyone could think that suing a toplevel domain for liability could possibly set a positive precedence, no matter the outcome. The prosecutor really needs to be taught internet 1o1, cause she clearly is way, way out fishing on this one!

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"So Mike, is it your position that registrars should be able to register domain names to sites that they know are committing criminal acts? I'm trying to understand what the problem is here."

The problem is you are a walking fucktard who wants everyone in the entire world to be responsible for even the slightest infringement of copyright EXCEPT THE ACTUAL PERPETRATOR of the infringement. You want liability all the way down to some homeless person who doesn't even have electricity, and punish 99% of the entire population by restricting their rights and/or fining and throwing them in jail because a few % of outliers do the actual infringing, which doesnt even have a significant impact on anyone's bottom line anyway (see: several BILLION DOLLAR GROSSING movies THIS YEAR ALONE.)

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"The Pirate Bay was ruled to "encourage infringement". Which to this day, still has me scratching my head. How can a court find someone guilty of aiding a crime, (not in committing the crime themselves) but not actually charge anyone with committing the actual crime?

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Should a registrar be able to tell if a site commits criminal acts if it registers a domain name like:

PrendaLaw.com
Ingenuity123.com
AFholdings.com
RIAA.com
MPAA.com

etc, and other criminal organization domain names?

Should the registrar be able to deny registration if the name looks suspicious? Or if it doesn't look like a clear lawful purpose can be determined? A name like RIAA.com might seem suspicious. After all, it could be an acronym or initialism for a lot of things:

Beyond stupid

Stupid is sort of thing that the US DOJ does (see: MegaUpload case). I'm pretty sure the brainiacs at the Justice Department aren't so lobotomized that they would even consider going after an entire domain registrar.

If we really want to root out all of the accomplices to piracy, we must go much farther. The biggest offenders are farmers. Farmers grow the corn that nourishes the miners that mine the ore that is used to make the cars that the registrar workers use to get to work where they host websites, some of which allow other people to download unauthorized, ILLEGAL strings of 1s and 0s. If you really want to stop piracy, burn the crops!

Re: Liability Slipery Slope

"Each Contracting State undertakes to surrender to the other, subject to the provisions and conditions laid down in this Convention, those persons found in its territory who have been charged with or convicted of any of the offenses specified in Article II of this Convention
committed within the territorial jurisdiction of the other, or outside thereof under the conditions specified in Article IV of this Convention."

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So Mike, is it your position that registrars should be able to register domain names to sites that they know are committing criminal acts? I'm trying to understand what the problem is here.

Wow. You guys are so sensitive that you had to report this comment? That's just sad. You guys really can't stand it if anyone challenges anything. It's a TERRIBLE environment you produce here. It's really, really, really sad that you act this way.

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> So Mike, is it your position that registrars
> should be able to register domain names to
> sites that they know are committing criminal
> acts?

How does a registrar know what a website is even about? Even if you wanted to burden the registrars with having to review every single web site and act as internet censors, if a site hasn't been registered yet, it's not up and running, so there's nothing for them to look at, genius.

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If they are registering the domain name for the purpose of operating a site that the registar knows is criminal, then yes, the registrar is assisting in criminal acts. They weren't just registering any site. It was the Pirate Bay, a known criminal enterprise.

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Are you seriously asking how a registrar could know what the most notorious criminal infringement website is up to after they were told by authorities about it? You're missing the point. This isn't about them knowing about it ahead of time. It's about them being told by authorities what the domain name had been used for and may be used for again and then them refusing to cooperate. You sure you're a lawyer? The TF article explains this.

what is just as frightening is that the USA entertainment industries have corrupted the legal system of another country so much, that this sort of thing is happening! it's bad enough when these industries have what amounts to a 'carte blanche' in the USA to do whatever they want and get as much assistance and backing as they want from those in positions of power when they are supposed to be looking after the interests of all. to spread the tentacles so far is disgraceful! for other countries to be intimidated to such an extent as to follow this type of course is inexcusable! the effects of this could have such far reaching and serious consequences for everyone the world over is so frightening, it is beyond belief. and it is all in order to carry on a vendetta against a group of people that had the balls to stand up against the corruption of the USA entertainment industries and the equally as corrupt abetters in USA politics and law enforcement, just to try to stop people sharing! how absolutely absurd is that??

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that the registar knows is criminal,

Do you have a plausible way for the registrar to determine that in advance of the site existing? Something that doesn't involve time-travel, perhaps?

"the Pirate Bay" is just a name. Are you arguing that simply having a domain name that includes words that might indicate referral to a previously criminal action is in and of itself illegal? Are you implying that if Bernie Madhoff writes a book, he can't register berniemadhoffponzischeme.com to promote it, because it might refer to something illegal?

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You're not taking it far enough, what enables the crops to do their misdeeds? The sun! That's right, the sun is the root of all evil and needs to be destroyed, I suggest we send all our nukes at it immediately!

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"A point was made."

An idiotic point, hence the AC's reaction to it.

But, let's go through the problems: first of all, how are domain names registered? Usually, they're registered before any content exists. I personally own 14 domain names, but there's only content on two of them. The registrar has absolutely no way of knowing what I plans to use them for. How are they meant to screen them before sale? Especially bearing in mind that they might not sell the domain directly (different rules apply to different countries, but many TLDs can be available in moments with no human screening).

After the domain is utilised for something, the registrar then has no way of knowing unless they constantly monitor it. They are not informed of any changes apart from the very basics (contact names, DNS servers). They have no relation to the content, no control over the hosting, and they sure as hell can't have knowledge of how legal the content is outside of their own country (and remember, before the US stuck its nose in, TPB was perfectly legal in Sweden).

So, at best what he's asking is that domain registrars should constantly monitor domains over which they have no direct control other than the ability to suspend if required. That's potentially millions of domains, for which they may not have the knowledge required to know if it's illegal (most infringing domains won't be as obvious as TPB, and a lot of perfectly legal services have been targeted in these kinds of cases). On top of that, there's the dangers of implementing such a thing - the ability for a private entity to censor speech is a very dangerous thing to promote, even if the aims in doing so are noble.

It's a silly point, and attacking those saying it's stupid doesn't really help improve it. There's no reason why a registrar should have responsibility for policing these things, any more than it's the phone company's or the yellow pages' responsibility for monitoring what you do with your phone number. They can investigate and react in response to legal requests, but they should not be responsible for policing it. There are many different agencies both better equipped and better positioned to do the same thing, and every possible bad action happens out of the registrar's control without their involvement or permission.

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Re: Liability Slipery Slope

Next will come the Quantum liability prosecutions....

Somewhere, in Some Universe (not ours), in some possible space time continuum, You may have infringed on a Copyright (where in our universe the law has been expanded ever upward to cover all possible quantum possible uses, including differences in time, space, temporal mechanics, or other currently unknown quantum phenomenon).

Since you have been accused, by nature of quantum mechanics, therefor you are guilty, all your possessions are forfeit to the **AA, your children will be held as indentured servants to the **AA for 100 years past the current youngest child's death.. aka Death + 100 years, and all your IP will be assimilated by the **AA's.

Welcome to your future, now go get a job and start paying your debt to the **AA's (debt to society is a foreign concept, as we asked, but nobody from "society" bothered to respond... guess there weren't that many left).

This message brought to you by your friendly tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist...

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To be fair, that's a subdomain of go.com - the TLD registrar has nothing to do with it.

But, there's plenty of problems raised by the hard of thinking above - if I for example register piratemovies.com, am I setting up a source for pirated movies, or a perfectly legal fan site or merchandising site for the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies? Nobody knows until the site is built, and that's got nothing to do with registrars.